


Thicker Than Blood

by alexczerny



Category: Original Work
Genre: Books, Cartel, Crime, F/F, F/M, Fiction, Gang, Gen, General fiction, Literature, M/M, Multi, Mystery, Original Fiction, Other, Suspense, criminal, thiller
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 10:41:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13269756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexczerny/pseuds/alexczerny
Summary: Abandoned in a run-down home in a horrific neighbourhood full of lethal gangs and cartels, a teenager, still mourning the death of his sister, becomes a part of the national drug cartel in hopes to find the reason behind all of the deaths that seem to follow him wherever he goes.In the strangest of places, he finds friendship for the first time, family, and answers to questions not yet asked.Is it possible that this cartel isn't behind all the death after all?Is it possible to find family in the worst of places?





	Thicker Than Blood

Chapter One

She packed the night before, something no one knew. And made a grocery run to the store the next morning. Everything seemed normal, the weather shone disgustingly hot all morning and into the afternoon as the car failed to show in the drive. The post didn’t arrive; not on a Sunday. The most uneventful day of the week. The day that masses file into doors to attend… _mass_. The day families sleep in, or argue, or do chores; I wouldn’t know. Is there such a thing as real families? I’d like to find out what their Sundays consist of.

I’d assume not the sudden dread that your mother has run off and abandoned her two children in a dilapidated home built too long ago to still exist. At least, hopefully. Otherwise, I suppose my story wouldn’t be so unique. More mundane, like the Sunday my mother left. Or the Saturday before it that held silences at tables and cigarette smoke on the porch, and another arrest on our block.

Growing up surrounded by life that crackles to life at night, and thrives off of defiance and drug-use, numbed me to the horrors of the world around me and my sister. She liked toys that looked like horses, so I stole them from the rich neighbours the next street over.

They never noticed.

They never will.

Who sits in a perfectly polished home and thinks about the creatures from dilapidated homes walking up kilometers of hill in boiling heat to steal children’s toys.

No one.

No when that much money surrounds you. Not when Sundays are ordinary and static.

So I stole things, my sister cried to sleep at night, and the AC turned off in the heat of Los Angeles summer. Permanently. Which shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it was; no one was paying the bills, no one was mending the broken amenities. It looked as though no one was home.

Enduring the putrid heat of the summer meant hiding in the cramped basement full of dust, and spiders and damp floors made of dirt and rusty metal from long ago. Tools and garden ornaments line the wall, hanging from precarious hooks made of bent wiring. And when the wind blows at night, they shake like metal trees whispering a sinister language.

We don’t go upstairs much, there’s too much up there at the same time that there is nothing. The carpet is grey—it wasn’t once—and the furniture is being eaten away by god-knows-what. There are dirt tracks in the floor here now where my sister plays with stolen toys, pink plastic slowly turning the same brown that blankets everything that surrounds us.

Sometimes the light mocking of thunder comes from upstairs when something topples over, or looters rob the house. There are broken windows and spray paint on the siding outside. Something written in another language, or a font that’s unreadable for a reason.

Some people call it art. I used to call it my home.

A lot of things used to mean something to me.

A lot of my life is regarded in past tense. My home, my mother, my family. My life, I suppose. Considering that living in the basement of what used to be your home doesn’t exactly qualify as _living_ , per say.

It might have been more useful if I’d have been someone with an optimistic attitude. If I’d been dealt at least one pro. I’d like to believe that, then, I’d have been able to make not-living into a new life. But my sister and I felt as though we were part of the house, decaying into the scenery, becoming part of the furniture. Rusting like the once useful tools in the basement.

A yellow flamingo has lost so much color and feature that it looks more haunting than the face I see in the mirror. When it got to the point that my sister would shake and cry at the sight of it, I knew it was time to throw it out.

It felt so much like redecorating. Like having a purpose. Which was, honestly, worse than doing nothing. Stepping out into the sunlight of the evening as it envelopes afternoon, people milling around on the streets on occasion. I stuck the flamingo into the ground in front of the house and told the demonic garden decoration to keep the ghouls away. From a distance it could have looked like the start of a garage sale, or a redecoration of the yard. A new beginning.

But from my perspective, it looked like a mouldy, decaying garden flamingo that, for some reason, is yellow. It’s hollow eyes stare out at the town built of paper people and white powder and I feel as though I finally connect myself to something.

Stuck in place, no choice but to stay, always decaying.

Always watching.

_  _  _

My sister died on October fourth. She liked ponies so I set a new one over her grave in the backyard. She had long hair, so I cut mine off. Her eyes were blue so I drank liquor from a blue bottle, from a blue house, up the road.

She’d gotten sick during the summer, and being that neither of us knew, or knew how to fix her. She stopped breathing in her sleep after coughing blood onto the dirt floor trying to fall asleep. I took the gold chain off her thin wrist that she used to play with and chew on, and fixed it to my own wrist. Where it’ll stay as long as my wrist stays large enough to hold it.

At this point, death sounded like an interesting prospect. A curious idea scratching the itches at the back of my mind. Depression had developed and fed inside my head, and was spreading itself through my mind like whatever disease took my sister. Dark and sinister, my mind started to tell me to ruin things.

Mirrors upstairs that still remained untouched. Old china my mother had kept locked in a cabinet near the sofa. The skin on my thighs, the walls around me. Anything in the house I could get a blade to.

Anything but that hideous flamingo.

I chopped apart the “for sale” sign that’s been in the drive for years. I chopped apart the couches and the wash clothes half-eaten by moths and beetles. There became something satisfying about ruining all I had left in the world.

A shame there’s no one to blame all this pain on, and ruin them too.

_ _ _

One morning, as I sat on the torn-up sofa, looking out the window at the streets, a black SUV drove by at a cautious pace. The windows tinted black, the tires glimmering silver with money and care. This vehicle does not belong in this neighbourhood.

Maybe if they leave it for long enough I can ruin it.

Instead, it sits on the curbside for hours until the sun bleeds behind the mountains and the rooftops of real homes. It sits so long, doors closed, windows up. Silence had fallen across the neighbourhood in expectation of what’s to come.

A man in torn, color-faded clothing approaches looking afraid and tentative. His shoes scrape the asphalt with the lack of commitment his body has left. There’s dirt on every piece of him except his hands, a glaring pale white in the evening. I follow him with my gaze as he nears the SUV.

For a long time, nothing happens, the sun sets fully, the man with the clean hands stands still, swaying like a branch in the breeze. The SUV sits like a statue, parked, static. Sunday.

I’m losing interest by the time the driver’s window rolls down, and the clean handed man steps closer, reaching out a hand in… request? Offering? Apology? Caution?

The man with pale hands accepts a paper bag, and nearly drops it. It’s too dark to see the face or the hand that passed it. Only light enough to know when the window rolls back up. The man uses his clean hands to open the bag, tearing at the folded opening like a wild animal, frustrated and determined.

That’s when he starts to yell. I can’t make out words because he doesn’t have enough of his mind left to articulate proper ones. But when his voice is loud enough to be heard over the fighting neighbours next door, the window behind the previous one to open slides down. This time there’s no paper bag, and no face and no argument.

The paper bag from before hits the pavement as my yellow flamingo and I watch the man with clean hands bleed out on the road as the SUV pulls away. Cautious and slow, determined and easy.

Static and calm like a Sunday.

I think I must have cried. Because my cheeks were wet after I threw up on the porch. I steady myself on the railing, slivers threatening to dig into my skin at the slightest wrong movement. My mouth tastes wrong and bitter and makes my stomach turn again. I can smell the death in the air now. It must have been hours. The sun rises slowly over the hills, and bores heat into the lifeless man on the road.

There’s no need to do anything. There’ll be an arrest later in the day. They’ll notice it, presumably. They’ll decide what to do with the dead man with clean hands and no face.

I head back inside and straighten out the little shelf in the kitchen holding my stolen foods. Nothing looks like something I should put inside my stomach, not with it this disturbed. But I have to eat something, I _force_ myself to believe that I have to eat something.

So I force stale bread down and try to mask the taste of my disgust with juice that tastes like chemicals.

I fall asleep on the living room floor for the first time in months, the grey carpet cushioning my back more than the dirt floor. I lean my back against the face of the sofa, and listen to the thrum of my heart as I try not to think about people without faces.

 


End file.
